Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Maine -- Fiction; Science fiction
Three days after hatching, the angel is the length of my fore-finger,
say three inches tall, with about the relative proportions of a
six-year-old girl. Except for head, hands, and probably the soles of
her feet, she is clothed in feathery down the color of ivory. What can
be seen of her skin is a glowing pink--I do mean glowing, like the
inside of certain seashells. Just above the small of her back are two
stubs which I take to be infantile wings. They do not suggest an extra
pair of specialized forelimbs. I think they are wholly differentiated
organs; perhaps they will be like the wings of an insect. Somehow I
never thought of angels buzzing. Maybe she won't. I know very little
about angels.
* * * * *
At present the stubs are covered with some dull tissue, no doubt a
protective sheath to be discarded when the membranes (if they are
membranes) are ready to grow. Between the stubs is a not very prominent
ridge--special musculature, I suppose. Otherwise her shape is quite
human, even to a pair of minuscule mammalian pin-heads just visible
under the down.
How that can make sense in an egg-laying organism is beyond my
comprehension. Just for the record, so is a Corot landscape; so is
Schubert's Unfinished; so is the flight of a hummingbird, or the
other-world of frost on a windowpane.
The down on her head has grown visibly in three days and is of
different quality from the body down. Later it may resemble human hair,
probably as a diamond resembles a chunk of granite....
A curious thing has happened. I went to Camilla's box after writing
that. Judy[1] was already lying in front of it, unexcited. The angel's
head was out from under the feathers, and I thought, with more
verbal distinctness than such thoughts commonly take, _So here I am,
a naturalist of middle years and cold sober, observing a three-inch
oviparous mammal with down and wings_.
[Footnote 1: Dr. Bannerman's dog, mentioned often earlier in the
journal, a nine-year-old English setter. According to an entry of May
15, 1951, she was then beginning to go blind--BLAINE]
The thing is--she giggled!
Now it might have been only amusement at my appearance, which to
her must be enormously gross and comic. But another thought formed
unspoken: _I am no longer lonely._ And her face, hardly bigger than
a dime, immediately changed from laughter to a brooding and friendly
thoughtfulness.
Judy and Camilla are old friends. Judy seems untroubled by the angel. I
have no worries about leaving them alone together.
* * * * *
June 3
I made no entry last night. The angel was talking to me, and when that
was finished I drowsed off immediately on a cot which I have moved into
the kitchen to be near them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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